The Xeon E5-2699 V5 – Intel’s flagship Skylake-EP lineup CPU has been leaked. And the leak comes at a time when Intel is preparing for 2017 launch Skylake-EP lineup. As you are probably aware, Intel Xeon Processor E5-2699 V4 based on 14nm technology was launched in Q1 2016. E5-2699 V4 runs with processor base frequency of 2.20GHz, with 3.6GHz Max turbo frequency and sports 55MB SmartCache. Priced at $4115, the high-performance product is worth every penny. Intel has already announced the general availability of Skylake-EP chips in 2017-mid. With several HPC focused optimizations, including Advanced Vector Instructions-512 and Omni Part architecture, this lineup is sure to boost floating point calculations and encryption algorithms.

Leaked image of Xeon E5-2699 (image source: taobao.com)

The E5-2699 V5 (ES) is the successor of the V4. According to the leak, E5-2699 V5 Skylake-EP will come with 32 cores, which translates to whopping 64 threads. The V5, then will have 10 more cores as compared to V4, which has 22 cores. The thread count is also up by 20 (64 for V5 vs 44 for V4). This gives a massive boost to V5’s performance.

One obvious question is why 32-cores? Could it be that Intel is trying to compete with AMD? Initial Advanced Micro Devices’ Naples benchmarks have revealed that it comes with 32 cores, 64 threads and is touted to be AMD’s next big top enterprise solution. Naples uses ZEN architecture – so it comes with SMT adoption, improved branch prediction through a double path for each Branch Target Buffer, increased schedulers, increased cache sizes, quad issue FPU, move elimination and other implementations. Intel is well on its way to compute with AMD’s flagship (or not so great?) Naples CPU. One other explanation for 32 cores could be that Intel plans to offer Skylake-EP (Xeon E5) and Skylake-EN (Xeon E7) with the same number of cores.

Well, it remains to be seen if AMD will ever catch up with Intel. What began as heating issues in AMD chips continues to haunt AMD even to this day. The general perception that AMD chips are more prone to heating issues still lingers in the minds of people, although AMD has taken all possible measures to tackle heating issues. Will AMD Naples CPU beat Intel’s next flagship offering? Let’s wait and watch!